the power of VR goes beyond simply recruiting. The University of Michigan uses the technology as a learning tool, and by instituting a virtual reality “cave” they’ve allowed engineering students to interact with virtual structures as they “come together, buckle and collapse.” Instead of relying on physical models—which tend to be large, expensive, and slow to build—a student using the MIDEN VR cave can fly around a virtual structure to study mechanical connections.
Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.
Twain, M. (2006). The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Chapter 2.
online instructors can use gamification to boost student interest in their content.
Educational games can ‘hook’ students through extrinsic motivators and gradually promote an appreciation of the content and a level of satisfaction from the pursuit of knowledge and the solution of problems.
Designed by Chaim Gingold, a Ph.D. student at UC Santa Cruz, indie developer and designer of Spore’s creature creator, “Earth Primer” is a reinvention of the textbook. Unlike the all-too-familiar “interactive textbooks” that are little more than pictures and animations tacked on to traditional text, “Earth Primer” starts from the ground up. It’s elegantly presented and paced.
Money and time are the two most common barriers to using games in the classroom. “Extrasolar” solves both while also striking pedagogical gold: authentic, self-motivated learning. It’s a free alternate reality game (ARG) that mimics the day-to-day life of a rover driver exploring an alien planet for a mysterious space agency. Rather than placing players in some fantastical world, they interact with what looks like a typical desktop interface, giving their rover commands, and waiting to receive photographs and data from the alien world as well as messages from their employer. Each bit of play requires only a few minutes of activity. The wait builds tension, and when matched with the relatively mundane interface and tasks, it doesn’t feel like a game — which is kind of the point. Best of all: It’s all based in real science and, like with any good ARG, has a healthy dose of mystery to give players a reason to return.
Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.
You don’t need to write any code to create a simple story with Twine, but you can extend your stories with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript when you’re ready.
Twine publishes directly to HTML, so you can post your work nearly anywhere. Anything you create with it is completely free to use any way you like, including for commercial purposes.
Project Syria, a virtual reality experience built by a team of students at USC.
“I sometimes call virtual reality an empathy generator,” she says. “It’s astonishing to me. People all of a sudden connect to the characters in a way that they don’t when they’ve read about it in the newspaper or watched it on TV.”
What Peña’s doing — using virtual reality in combination with reporting — is part of a wider landscape of video games being created to explore the news. And they’re called, appropriately enough, “newsgames.”
“There’s an argument to be made that games are perfect at getting at the systemic problems and challenges in the world,” says Ian Bogost, a professor at Georgia Tech.
Take a game that he helped make called Oil God. In the game, the player controls an oil-rich region, waging wars and inciting coupes. The player learns that oil prices are contingent on all sorts of factors rarely mentioned in a story about the price of a gallon of gas.
creating games to bring awareness to social issues for over a decade. The game to create the biggest waves was arguably MTV’s “Darfur is Dying” released online in 2006, in which players took up the role of a family displaced by conflict in Darfur.
the Joan Ganz Cooney Center found that 74 percent of K-8 teachers surveyed use digital games for instruction in some way and 55 percent use them weekly.
Confused About Ed Tech Tools? New Rating Site for Apps and Games
game-based learning differs from gamification in several important ways. Sometimes the latter is reduced to bells and whistles such as gold stars and progress bars, but gamification is potentially a much more subtle and powerful teaching strategy.
lizabeth Goins (Rochester Institute of Technology) describes several recent projects including a 3D game based on Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights in her blog, and details as well assignments in which the students create games. Keri Watson (University of Central Florida), teaches with both a RPG (role-playing game) and an ARG (alternative reality game). The RPG is Gretchen Kreahling McKay’s “Modernism versus Traditionalism: Art in Paris, 1888-89,” a Reacting to the Past(see earlier PH coverage) game, targeted for use in first year seminars at small liberal arts colleges. She taught with the game several times while at Ithaca College and reflects on her experience here. Watson’s ARG, “Secret Societies of the Avant-garde,” was createdwith a colleague in digital media as a Unity-based game, and is still in development. (Anastasia Salter wrote about this game in February.) Their prototype was deployed this past spring in an upper level modern art course, the game poses for the students a series of the challenges to research and create online exhibitions. (Those interested in developing an ARG might also want to peruse this interesting recent piece from TechCrunch on historical accuracy in games.)
